Amritkar R E, Rangarajan Govindan
Physical Research Laboratory, Navrangapura, Ahmedabad - 380009, India.
Phys Rev Lett. 2006 Jun 30;96(25):258102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.258102. Epub 2006 Jun 29.
More than 99% of the species that ever existed on the surface of the Earth are now extinct and their extinction on a global scale has been a puzzle. One may think that a species under an external threat may survive in some isolated locations leading to the revival of the species. Using a general model we show that, under a common external forcing, the species with a quadratic saturation term first undergoes spatial synchronization and then extinction. The effect can be observed even when the external forcing acts only on some locations provided the dynamics contains a synchronizing term. Absence of the quadratic saturation term can help the species to avoid extinction.
